मौर्य साम्राज्य

These three officers appear together in the Third Major Rock Edict, which directs them to go out on tour every five years for the propagation of dhamma and for the discharge of ordinary administrative business. They are consistently placed at the district level in the standard reconstruction of Mauryan administration. The Pradeshika was the district head with general charge, the Rajuka exercised revenue and judicial functions and is described in Pillar Edict IV as having been granted independence in judicial matters, and the Yukta was a subordinate officer handling accounts and secretarial work. This gives (b).

• Option (a) is wrong because village level administration rested with the Gramika and the village elders, who are separate.
• Option (c) is wrong because the provinces were headed by Kumaras or princes of royal blood stationed at Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali and Suvarnagiri.
• Option (d) is wrong because the central administration comprised the Mantriparishad and the tirthas or high functionaries such as the Samaharta and Sannidhata, again a distinct tier.

• Statements 2 and 3 reproduce provisions of the Arthashastra's treatment of slaves closely. The text lays down that a female slave who bears a child to her master shall be recognised as free, and that the son so begotten shall be entitled to the legal status of the master's son, both provisions reflecting the work's characteristic concern to regulate rather than merely to permit the institution, and to bound it in ways that mark Kautilya's dasa off from chattel slavery as understood elsewhere.
• Statement 1 is treated as incorrect by the key. On that reading the routes into servitude recognised by the text are sale of oneself or of a dependant, capture in war, birth to a slave woman and voluntary pledging against a debt, and judicial sentence is not among them.
• Statements 2 and 3 holding, (b) is the answer, and options (a), (c) and (d) each admit statement 1.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Dhauli is in Odisha, near Bhubaneswar, and carries one of the two separate Kalinga edicts along with the rock cut elephant, its location on the presumed field of the Kalinga war giving it particular significance.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Erragudi, in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, carries a major rock edict set and is the southernmost of the major rock edict sites.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Jaugada is in Ganjam district of Odisha, not Madhya Pradesh, and it is the second of the two sites carrying the separate Kalinga edicts, which replaced the usual edicts XI to XIII with instructions to officials on the treatment of the newly conquered population.
• Pair 4 is incorrectly matched. Kalsi is in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand, on the Yamuna, not in Karnataka, and it is the northernmost of the major rock edict sites. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (b).
• Options (a), (c) and (d) each misjudge the count, and a candidate who recalls that both separate Kalinga edicts are in Odisha can settle pair 3 immediately.

The passage is a close rendering of Ashoka's Major Rock Edict XII, which enjoins restraint of speech, concourse between sects and honour to other sects as the path of dhamma. Hence (a).

• Option (b) is wrong because Samudragupta's principal epigraph, the Allahabad pillar prashasti composed by Harishena, is a catalogue of conquests and royal accomplishments and carries no ethical exhortation to subjects.
• Option (c) is wrong because Harshavardhana is known chiefly through Banabhatta's Harshacharita and the account of Xuanzang rather than through moral edicts addressed to the population.
• Option (d) is wrong because Krishnadeva Raya's Amuktamalyada is a Telugu poem containing counsel on statecraft directed at a ruler, not an inscription instructing subjects on sectarian tolerance.

James Prinsep, an assay master of the East India Company's mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which unlocked the Ashokan edicts. The immediate historical consequence was substantial: the inscriptions name their author only as Devanampiya Piyadassi, and it was the correlation of that title with the Sri Lankan chronicles, the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, that identified him as Ashoka and restored the Mauryan emperor to Indian history. Hence (b).

• Option (a), Georg Bühler, was a distinguished epigraphist and Indologist who worked extensively on Indian palaeography, but he came a generation later and built on Prinsep's decipherment.
• Option (c), Max Müller, was a philologist and Sanskritist known for editing the Rig Veda and the Sacred Books of the East, not an epigraphist.
• Option (d), William Jones, founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 and established the relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, but died in 1794, four decades before the decipherment. The chronological route alone eliminates Jones, and the association of Prinsep with Brahmi and Kharosthi settles the rest.